considered harmful

Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of

the ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first

salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM

considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it

will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so

assertive a position against a coding practice. In the

ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and

parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". The

structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the

realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles

has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.

[Jargon File]